Indonesian political leaders in the mid-20th century attempted to create a new state founded both on the rule of law and on their understandings of traditional Indonesian communal life. They sought simultaneously to “advance” toward modernization and industrialization and to preserve older, village-level norms and values which they projected onto the national legal and political screen. This article examines the inconsistencies inherent in these twin aspirations and the continuing tensions, during a period of rapid growth and economic development, between rights-based conceptions and those based on an ideology of harmony and communal village life.

Against most male-dominated accounts of professional work, elite law firms in India pose a puzzling exception: women make up about half of these firms, even at senior levels of partnership. Using in-depth interviews with over 130 professionals in India's elite litigation, transactional law, and consulting firms, this research suggests that elite law firms—as new local organizations—aggressively differentiate themselves from their more traditional peers to establish organizational legitimacy. At the same time, as institutions trying to mimic global firms without actual scripts for doing so, these firms engage in a form of “speculative isomorphism” through which they signal meritocracy and modernity to their global audience. Because equal gender representation is one such mechanism, the result is environments where certain kinds of women are uniquely advantaged.

Social classifications are increasingly interrelated, far-reaching, and consequential for socioeconomic outcomes. We use the concept of marginalized legal categories to describe how the law disadvantages individuals or groups by transforming inherently ordered social classifications into consequential legal categories, employing intestacy laws as an illustration. Using the Survey of Consumer Finances, we find that more than 21% of American families have forms that are marginalized by intestacy classifications, and that such forms are more common among individuals of color and those with less wealth. Yet, many individuals with these family structures hold assets and lack access to intestacy-avoidance mechanisms, giving consequence to the application of these laws. We conclude by discussing implications of legal classification for inequality.

This paper revisits the sociology of international commercial arbitration on the basis of unexploited archives and data. This material casts new light on the competition between “grand old men” and “young technocrats” in the 1980s and 1990s, a theme that has structured the analysis of international commercial arbitration since the pioneering work of Yves Dezalay and Bryant G. Garth (Dealing in Virtue). In contrast, the data show that the crucial transformative period actually took place between the 1950s and 1970s, when a relatively well-defined group of individuals emerged as the leading arbitrators at the International Chamber of Commerce. These individuals— the “secant marginals”—succeeded in constructing a cooperative interface (rather than competition) between otherwise separate legal systems and professions. In doing so, they created the conditions necessary for the emergence of a new transnational legal profession. At a more general level, the article proposes an alternative narrative of globalization, wherein actors operating at the intersection of various systems, create new arenas of governance on the basis of inter-system cooperation.

Community standards for sexually explicit and violent depictions were measured using a representative sample of Western Tennessee residents. The residents were randomly assigned to view sexually explicit films charged in an obscenity case, violent materials, or control materials. The results showed that residents believe the sexually explicit films charged in the case did not appeal to a self-reported shameful, morbid, or unhealthy (prurient) interest in sex, and are not patently offensive. Community members indicated they would be substantially less accepting of the sexually explicit materials if they contained rape and bondage, and they showed virtually no acceptance of materials including children actors under the age of 18. Despite acceptance of sexually explicit films, there was no evidence that a majority of members of the community accepted violent “slasher” films. However, participants believed that the majority of others in the community tolerated the violent films they had viewed. These findings are discussed in light of an obscenity standard that presumes to take into account conventional morality and community opinion and the discrepancy between the obscenity code and community standards.

At the outset, I wish to thank Professor Upendra Baxi for his critical reading of the Schwartz-Miller article. Several years ago, when we first talked, he expressed a lively interest in the issue to which his present comment is directed (Baxi, 1974). His observations, then and now, have helped me to understand some theoretical and methodological complexities in Durkheim's position which I had earlier missed. I acknowledge with gratitude his scholarly observations and also his courteous manner in presenting them.

In a critique of our paper, “Severity of Formal Sanctions as a Deterrent to Deviant Behavior” (Law and Society Review, 1970: 21-40), Professor Paul E. Meehl has questioned our interpretation of the data particularly in Table 3 of the original paper. On the basis of that evidence, we concluded that severity of formal sanctions show no direct deterrent effect on the deviant behavior under consideration, but do appear to have an indirect deterrent effect through their impact on the normative climate of the campus (p. 37). In challenging this interpretation of the data, Professor Meehl expressed concern that non social science readers of the Review might be misled by our use of “causal language” in the interpretation of these tabulations from cross sectional data.

Sociology of law in the Chinese mainland is currently enjoying a revival. Since 1979 the legalization of Chinese society has been surging forward; legal theories, however, have made slow progress. Some approaches, such as “perplexity of jurisprudence” or “the crisis of Communist legal theory,” have revealed restlessness and reflection in law circles. Therefore, when a few young research workers raised the clarion call “Make a breach in doctrinairism through sociology of law,” a chord was struck in the hearts of many people. On September 12, 1987, the first national symposium for sociology of law was held under the auspices of the Law Department of Peking University and the Politics and Law Research Group in the Institute of Reform of the Economic System in China. Over three days, the fifty-three persons present from thirty organizations throughout the country submitted twenty-five papers to the symposium, decided on the Plan for Exchange and Research in Legal Sociology (abbreviated in English as PERLS), and discussed the tasks ahead. As of January 30, 1988, the membership of PERLS had reached 186 (including forty-one policy research workers of state organs and ten lawyers), and the number of research projects concerning sociology of law totaled six, scattered all over Beijing Municipality, Shanghai Municipality, and Jilin and Jiangxi provinces. The Institute of Comparative Law and Sociology of Law, Peking University, and the Shanghai Institute of Sociology of Law were established recently. In addition, there are also some new research organizations concerned, such as the Commission of Law Studies in the Chinese Association of Behavior Science, the Institute of Sociology and the Research Group of Legal Systems Science in China University of Political Science and Law, and the Institute of Legal Psychology in Nankai University. The reestablishment of sociology of law in China is directed and supported by Professor Zhao Zhen-jiang, chair of the law department of Peking University, and Professor Shen Zong-ling, head of the Institute of Comparative Law and Sociology of Law in the same university.

Much attention has been devoted recently to intercircuit doctrinal conflicts in the United States Courts of Appeals (Commission, 1975b: 30-32, 37-44). Less attention has been paid to the equally—if not more—serious problem of intracircuit doctrinal conflict, which causes difficulties for lawyers attempting to advise clients and for district judges trying to apply circuit law (Wasby, 1979). Observers have suggested that decreased frequency of communication among appellate judges leads to less consistency in their decisions. Where judicial interaction is infrequent, because of increased numbers of judges on a court or the judges' geographic dispersion, the “law of the circuit” tends toward disharmony (Commission, 1973: 19-20, and 1975b: 130; also Friendly, 1973: 45). The existence and extent of intracircuit inconsistency may thus be viewed as dependent variables, the number of judges and the judges' geographic dispersion, or both, as independent variables, and communication among judges as a key intervening variable.

Only a few years ago it was customary and appropriate to begin an essay on Supreme Court efficacy by lamenting the paucity of empirical studies dealing with this problem. Such an introduction is no longer in order, since we have recently witnessed a flourishing of research on the actual consequences of judicial decisions. Both the appearance of at least one book of readings on Supreme Court impact (Becker, 1969) and the focusing of panels around this topic at political science conventions are indications of the emergence of “legal impact” as a significant field of scholarly inquiry.

Many commentators have explained the shift in policy from the quietude of Legal Aid to the aggressive advocacy of Legal Services by pointing to a change in personnel. This paper presents data on the background of a national sample of Legal Services lawyers in 1967, and through a variety of analyses argues that, though Legal Services differed from Legal Aid, neither the organization as a whole, its reformist elements, nor its local administrators were dominated by a “new breed” of activist lawyer with elite credentials. Instead, Legal Services in both 1967 and 1972 was characterized by a remarkable heterogeneity of staff. Implications of these findings for the delivery of lawyers' services to the poor are discussed, and it is suggested that the “radical” character of the program is due more to the opportunities Legal Services has offered lawyers to pursue client interests than to background characteristics of personnel.

Scholarly interest about online advocacy in authoritarian settings is rapidly growing. With one of Asia's most active social media, Vietnam offers a promising site to investigate how online advocates navigate around state censorship to influence regulatory decisionmaking. Much research about online advocacy focuses on rational discourse, and fails to ask why satire and ridicule can change regulatory outcomes when reasoned debate fails. This article considers two cases studies where online advocates changed regulatory outcomes in Vietnam. It investigates why the regulators were sensitive to moral censure in social media, and responded to appeals for solidarity, but were reluctant to engage in rational public deliberation. These findings reveal insights into how online advocacy can trigger emotional responses in officials that transform the regulatory environment. The article concludes that rather than constituting cognitive missteps, emotions are integral to government regulation in Vietnam.

The authors of this article attempt to examine jury performance by collating and comparing views on the jury's verdicts drawn from other participants in the trial. This research is based on a study of jury trials heard in the Crown Court at Birmingham, England, together with additional material drawn from a sample of cases in London. It shows that doubts about both acquittals and convictions by jury were expressed with a surprising frequency. An examination of the remedies available to correct miscarriages of justice demonstrates the ineffectiveness of current appeals procedures. The authors conclude that it is necessary to evaluate the jury's function within a political context.

Under what conditions will individuals mobilize law to resist states that operate above the law? In authoritarian countries, particularly in the Middle East, law is a weapon the state wields for social control, centralizing power, and legitimation. Authoritarian legal codes are overwhelmingly more deferential to state authority than protective of citizens' rights. Nevertheless, people throughout the Arab world deploy law to contest a broad array of state abuses: land expropriations, unlawful arrests, denials of jobs and welfare, and so on. Using detailed interviews in Jordan and Palestine, I outline a theory of law as a tool for resisting authoritarian state actors. Integrating qualitative insights with survey experiments fielded in Egypt and Jordan, I test this theory and show that aggrieved individuals mobilize law when they expect courts are powerful and attainable allies in contentious politics. My results further demonstrate that judicial independence does not uniformly increase authoritarian publics' willingness to access courts.

Formal conflict resolution is not the principal function of the Philippine Court of Agrarian Relations. Rather, litigants mobilize the court's resources to increase their power over opponents and to maximize gains. A combination of the rights stipulated for the litigants, the aims of the principal and adjunct actors, and the relative power and wealth of the disputants and their allies determines who gets what and how in this struggle. Because the agrarian court exists in a social context where law as norm and the general distribution of power operate to the advantage of the “have” sector, it is limited in its capacity to effectuate social change.

The judge in a jury trial is charged with excusing prospective jurors who will not be impartial. To assess impartiality, prospective jurors are typically asked whether they can be fair. Using an experimental paradigm, we found that small changes in jurors' self-reported confidence in their ability to be fair affected judges' decisions about bias but did not affect the judgments of either attorneys or jurors. We suggest why a judge's role and unique relationship with jurors is likely to foster a decision strategy based on reported juror confidence, and we discuss the implications of our analysis for current legal debates over jury selection practices. Unexpected patterns in our results also highlight the ways in which perceptions of impartiality are affected, in part, by the social characteristics of the observer.

Strands of scholarly writing on corporate bankruptcy are scattered across the fields of economics, jurisprudence, political science, and policy analysis. These varied perspectives tend to share common weaknesses that point directly to adding a sociological voice to the debate. An analytic framework that emphasizes power, interorganizational ties, and the embeddedness of organizational action in a larger social structure yields new insights into “strategic bankruptcies,” such as the Chapter 11 filing of the Manville Corporation. In turn, this perspective leads to a questioning of some of the basic assumptions concerning the role and operation of bankruptcy law.

One definition of the “proletarianization of the professional” is that the professional loses “control over policy and value objectives” in his or her work (Derber 1982b: 17). Proletarianization is normally explained as resulting from workplace labor process control (ibid., p. 31). A compatible, but quite different, explanation relates proletarianization to changes in the social practices and ideological orientations of professional careers. In this research note, I present this different explanation and suggest avenues for empirical research.